What does the wetting agent do to the plant then? i think i have that stuff in my potting mix (gulp).
Mezo.
Wetting agent isn't bad by itself. It's a neccesity in Perths dirt as the ground is often hydrophobic. IE if you try water a garden or lawn here, you'll just have puddles sitting on the surface sometimes.
So I use a wetting agent on my vege patch or lawn a couple of times a year to get the water to soak into the soil. I've also used it on potting mix that I let dry out too much. Without it you can't get any water to penetrate the surface/mass of the soil.
It's just a bad idea for a seed raising mix that already has coir and wetting crystals, especially for chillies as it means it will just soak up and absorb and hold moisture for a long long time. Without the wetting agent maybe at least there would be some drier pockets of soil?
But I use wetting agents on the ground and in dry dry dry plants/soil all the time. I just wouldn't have it (or wetting crystals) for chilli seedlings. I do germinate in coir though, without either of them, and that alone is sometimes a struggle to keep them from getting too wet. It's a skill I need to work more on, but it's hard enough as it is without the wetting agent and crystals.
Hi guys,
Does anyone here use the paper towel in ziplock bag method to sprout their seeds? Last year I used a mix of Jiffys (teabags and pots) and seed raising mix but had quite a few failures with the jiffys as it seemed like some would dry out really quickly and others would stay too moist sometimes. This year I was purely going to use seed raising mix with 3 seeds per 100mm pot but soon realised with 25 varieties I'm not going to be able to fit them all on or over my heat mat and don't really have anything else warm enough to encourage sprouting.
So I'm thinking about trying the paper towel & ziplock bag method because I can keep 25 bags warm much easier than 25 pots... Once sprouted and placed into seed raising mix do they still need the 25C+ temps or can they drop down to about 22C of my house temp?
Or does someone have a better idea? I'm open to trying anything to get a high germination rate
Thanks in advance
I tried it last year with some success. It wasn;t the best method I tried, but it did work. To be honest though the seeds I was using was fail seeds. IE I started all out in potting mix, some varieties didn't work even the second try. So I gave those non working seeds another try in jiffies, some seeds worked for the first time. And whatever didn't work in jiffies I tried in desperation the paper towel method, some worked.
So all the easy to germinate seeds I never tried with paper towels as they worked fine in potting mix, and some worked fine in jiffies.
If the seed is good, it's really easy to germinate. If it's hard to germinate, it's not the method IMHO, it's the seed being not very good. So blame the seed I think.
But as I did get a couple of bad seed stock germinating on paper towels it's worth a shot if you want to do it purely for space saving reasons. But if you are using the same seed as last year, you may not get any better results, and you may see a fair few go moldy. And that's not because anything you've done wrong, it's because the seed is bad from the beginning.
Once they have germinated you don't need to keep the heat up. mine go to colder areas of the house near the windows once germinated (light is more important that heat)